Medical Education
As a national-level medical center, medical care services, education, and research are our three main missions. High-quality clinical education is the key to cultivating medical professionals for the future. Thus, we established an education (teaching) department to improve the quality of clinical teaching at TVGH and even nationwide.
In September 1959, the Executive Yuan classified TVGH as a university hospital under the National Defense Medical Center. The Ministry of National Defense then implemented "Methods for Provision of Mutual Support between National Defense Medical Center and Veterans General Hospital on Academic Research" and "Methods for Military and Medical Professionals to Transfer to Work at Veterans General Hospital." The founding of the hospital was hosted by the first superintendent of NDMC and TVGH Lu Chih-te (盧致德). A team of professionals with a wide range of expertise helped to design the hospital's tasks to take, and they served as the hospitals' division supervisors and leaders. It was soon decided that NDMC's teaching and research would be carried out at TVGH – this brought the two institutions closely together. This marked the start of decades-long partnership between NDMC and TVGH.
In July 1975, National Yang-Ming School of Medicine was established. In December 1977, upon an approval from the Ministry of Education, TVGH signed a cooperation contract with National Yang-Ming School of Medicine to make TVGH its teaching hospital. In 1994, Yang-Ming was upgraded to be National Yang-Ming University, and since then it has remained in close collaborations with TVGH. Its students have mostly come to TVGH to do internships and many of our doctors have become full-time lecturers for the university, devoting to medical education for long years. What’s more, we have developed an innovative "problem-based learning (PBL) system" for the medical schools throughout Taiwan.

In 1997, to assist Faculty of Medicine, National Yang-Ming University to further develop the PBL system and culture-based medical education, a teaching improvement group was established under TVGH's education committee. Parts of TVGH's teaching and research funding went to this program and we encouraged our faculty staff to carry out teaching and research plans, in hopes to revolutionize medical education.
During the 1980s, other than signing a draft for implementing industry-university collaboration with Taipei Nursing College, TVGH established collaborative ties with hospitals of all various levels in Taiwan. For instance, in 1984, we became sister hospitals with Fengjia Hospital in Tainan City. In the same year, as invited by Provincial Changhua, Yilan, and Hualien Hospital, as well as Kaohsiung Municipal Minshen Hospital, we signed industry-university collaboration contracts with them. As the government's evaluation standard for medical centers got stricter in hopes to improve quality of general medical care, TVGH has collaborated with more and more medical institutions on many more projects. In 2016, we already worked with more than 70 such institutions, and the collaboration items include: personnel training, joint training for resident doctors, academic exchange, research collaborations, medical support for doctors, and transfers and checks.
In 1997, we started working with National Taiwan University Hospital. While TVGH and NTUH were the top two hospitals in the country, we decided not to try to take the upper hand of one another, but to contribute to teaching and research together. This was considered major news in the medical circle then, and media reported much about this. Since 2007, the two hospitals have carried out many more research projects. In 2008, we released a range of initial research results together. We have continued such collaborations since then.